Twenty-six students, faculty, staff and alumni representing Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center participated in and provided official documentation of the Internet Governance Forum-USA 2011 at Georgetown University Law Center on July 18.
The posting of documentary content online can be found:
- On Twitter – documentary tweets: Search the hashtag #IGF11-USA
- On WordPress – written and photographic coverage: http://igfusa.wordpress.com/
- On Imagining the Internet – full written reports and video clips:
http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/igf_usa/igf_usa_2011.xhtml
School of Communications Advisory Board member Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, delivered the morning keynote talk, “Understanding Users’ Views.”
Imagining the Internet Center director Janna Anderson, associate professor in the School of Communications, led a 25-person journalism team of Elon undergraduates, alumni, faculty and staff in near-real-time documentary coverage of the 14 events during the day. Anderson has been a member of the IGF-USA Steering Group since 2009, and she helped plan all three IGF-USA programs to date.
Elon staff members Colin Donohue and Brian Meyer, both School of Communications alumni, assisted in leading the documentary coverage at the event. In addition, alumni Ashley Barnas, Morgan Little, Carolyn VanBrocklin, Lianna Catino and Bethany Swanson took a day off from their professional work to join in, volunteering to participate in key roles as editors and reporters.
Among the current School of Communications undergraduates participating as reporters were: Ronda Ataalla, Kellye Coleman, Anna Johnson, Steven Ebert, Natalie Allison, Melissa Kansky, Jeff Stern, Nicole Chadwick, Jeff Ackermann, Joe Bruno, Jeff Flitter, Elizabeth Kantlehner, Derek Scully, Rachel Southmayd, Katy, Steele, Julie Morse and Kristen Case.
At Elon University, even the parents of alumni get involved in events. Brian and Maureen Donohue, Colin’s parents, have opened their home up the past three years to host a number of the Elon students who are participating as volunteers in the journalistic coverage of IGF-USA.
Four people from the Elon team were also key participants in a session titled “Digital Natives? Mythbusting Assumptions,” featuring a group of college students discussing misconceptions about young people’s Internet uses and needs. The session was co-moderated by Donohue, and featured Ataalla, Coleman and Stern as panelists.
Among the other events were a series of scenario sessions in which participants imagined what might happen if certain drivers occur in the processes of Internet evolution between now and 2025; a session on the changing ways in which disaster management can be mitigated through online tools; and sessions on the evolution of the Domain Name System and the influences of IPv6 on critical Internet resources and on the typical user.
A key event of the day was a policy overview session concentrating on the ways in which a number of organizations have been framing “Internet principles” in a number of formalized documents in the past year, including:
- The OECD Communique on Principles for Internet Policy-Making: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/40/21/48289796.pdf
- The sections of the May 2011 G8 Declaration that focus on the Internet: http://www.g20-g8.com/g8-g20/g8/english/live/news/renewed-commitment-for-freedom-and-democracy.1314.html
- The U.S. International Strategy on Cyberspace: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/internationalstrategy_cyberspace.pdf
- The Brazilian Principles for the Internet: http://einclusion.hu/2010-04-17/internet-principles-in-brazil/
- And the Council of Europe’s Internet Governance Principles: http://www.coe.int/t/dghl/standardsetting/media-dataprotection/conf-internet-freedom/Internet%20Governance%20Principles.pdf.
Among the hundreds of participants in IGF-USA 2011 were Larry Strickling, administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration; Heather Shaw, vice president for ICT policy for the United States Council for International Business; Sheila Flynn, of the cyber policy office of the U.S. State Department; Jackie Ruff, vice president for international public policy and regulatory affairs for Verizon Communications; Jeff Brueggeman, vice president for public policy at AT&T; Cynthia Wong, director of the Project on Global Internet Freedom at the Center for Democracy & Technology; Mike Nelson, research associate for CSC Leading Edge Forum and visiting professor at Georgetown University; Robert Guerra, director of the Internet Freedom program at Freedom House; Susan Morgan, executive director of the Global Network Initiative; and Ambassador Philip Verveer of the U.S. State Department.